HARLAND SANDERS CAFE AND MUSEUM

The Harland Sanders Café is a historic restaurant located in Corbin, Kentucky. Colonel Harland Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, operated the restaurant from 1940-1956. Sanders also developed the famous KFC secret recipe at the café during the 1940s. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 7, 1990. After moving to North Corbin in 1930, Sanders started a service station across the street from the present location of the Harland Sanders Café along U.S. Route 25. Sanders served meals for travelers in the back of the service station at his own dining table, which seated six people. By 1937, the culinary skills of Sanders became well known and he built the Sanders Café, which seated 142 people. Two years later, the restaurant was destroyed by fire.Shortly after the fire in 1939, construction began on the present Sanders Café, along with the addition of a motel. The restaurant-motel complex reopened on July 4, 1940. A new addition to the café was a model of a motel room located in the adjacent Sanders' Motel. This was used to persuade customers to spend the night at the motel. Business continued to boom as it was located along U.S. 25, the main north-south route through central Kentucky. This soon changed with the completion of Interstate 75, which bypassed the restaurant and city entirely. Sanders sold the café in 1956 and began selling franchises for KFC.